Pennsylvania Dooms Democrats Again 2008

A few weeks before John McCain is sworn in as the next president of the United States, many in the press will likely ask What Happened To Barack Obama?

The majority will use antiquated measuring sticks to speculate on his inability to connect with white men, Catholics, Hispanics, older women, or low-income Reagan Democrats. Still others will ponder his first fractured weeks of April ’08, the spring of his discontent, when he had unlimited funds and media power, a groundswell of celebrity fervor, and two opponents both in and out of his party wounded by daunting preconceptions, relative campaign poverty, and the stench of old-time politics about them, but wasted valuable energy grappling with age-old labels of anti-Americanism, elitism and liberal mania. The rest will be left to deconstruct the night he tanked Pennsylvania and they’ll ultimately consider it his national election death knell. The night everyone finally realized that America would not be voting for a black, liberal, northerner, now matter how jazzed all the college kids and cable television hosts had become.

And they will all kick themselves for not seeing the obvious signs anyone with half the experience and none of the access were afforded. How could they not see that time and again all the huge crowds and revolutionary fire burning across the Internet and on the streets of big cities and on large campuses and the increasingly bogus blogoshpere had failed to seal a single absolute?

There are still very large holes in the “unsinkable” good ship Obama, flooded beyond retribution by the unshakably bizarre windmill-tipping masquerade of Hillary Rodham Clinton, spurned prom queen mutated into Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter.

But those paid to dissect this most historic of Democratic presidential primaries continually misread the American voter. Just when it seems the starry-eyed fallacy of youthful grass roots rebellion has all-but convinced the last vestiges of Journalism 101, things fall apart. Yet they continue to hold out the faintest hope for something new and improved, while clutching to a greater vision for big-time political theater. But it is repeatedly squashed by cold, hard facts; vote tallies they constantly push in Obama’s direction, despite all the evidence to the contrary; then real, raw votes push back.

Soon they will write that they did not heed the signs until it was far too late.

Perhaps they were too busy handing over a New Hampshire contest to the dynamic new kid on the block that he did not deliver. Still they paved a yellow brick road of Super Tuesday momentum in California, New York and New Jersey, but he was crushed. They ignored that and ascribed him lofty ambitions in Texas and Ohio after an incredible run of 12 wins in a row, effectively burying his opponent, but leading to his penultimate failure; he could not make Madam Shoo-In go away. They even convinced themselves to put him on the fast track to a single-digit loss in Pennsylvania that they believed would finally implode the old-time politicos to abandon ship and hand the whole caboodle over to a spit-shine orator that gave them all the kind of chills they’d conjured when they picked up the pen and applied for the press cards in the first place.

But it turns out no one has abandoned anything, and nobody with decades of bad road and shit-gorging and the soot and blood and sweat of long years on the stump and in the houses of congress and the backrooms of power are giving up the ghost that easily.

This is not Hollywood. This is not Dreamland. This is not a romantic novel of high expectations and heroic figures with candyland aspirations. This is the deep end of the American experience, the knife-fight, killjoy, air-sucking brass-knuckle jungle, and it is no place for unfurling preconceived notions of bountiful honor.

This is not Hollywood. This is not Dreamland. This is not a romantic novel of high expectations and heroic figures with candyland aspirations. This is the deep end of the American experience, the knife-fight, killjoy, air-sucking brass-knuckle jungle, and it is no place for unfurling preconceived notions of bountiful honor.

This is the black hole no one admits forms at the center of our high-and-mighty republic, a black hole that swallowed the Barack Obama myth in the Keystone State on April 22, 2008.

If Pennsylvania acts as anything but a Democratic Waterloo, it will be nothing short of a miracle. The only maneuver that might save the party from total annihilation is if Obama steals Indiana and snaps the mass hallucination that is the Hillary Clinton campaign on May 6. Then he will be free to provide serviceable fodder for Dick Nixon’s legendary Silent Majority.

But winning in November against a Caucasian gray-haired military Republican is now completely and utterly out of the question.

However, if Obama fails to take Indiana and shake up these rubes that keep handing the Clintons money so they can play candidate fantasy camp, the following scenarios are tabled:

1. The whole sordid ordeal goes all the way to the Denver National Convention with a Goldwater/Rockefeller type party split motivating a frightened gaggle of super delegates to force-feed the combined ticket of a woman/black man, which will lose the national election by a minimum of twenty points.

2. The Clinton Machine tumbles forth into August demanding retribution for Michigan and Florida delegates, prompting a perceived kidnapping of the nomination against overwhelming mathematics (trailing in pledged delegates, popular vote, and overall contests won) and voter will, which would likely incite a mass walkout of over thirty states and lead to a GOP landslide, or even more fatal for Democrats, an Obama secession into a third party that would not only queer any chance the Democrats have in 2008 but obliterate the party’s standing for the all-important redistrict extravaganza of 2010 that currently has them salivating for a national power grab.

3. Obama limps to inevitable victory in late-June with enough mud on him to sink even the most vetted, lily-white southern-crossed governor, let alone a black guy with ten minutes experience.

Not one of these scenarios ends with a Democrat in the White House, in a year that a splintered rake and a stripped ’74 Impala could defeat the Republicans.

What started out as a press geek’s dream has turned into a Fellini nightmare of clowns and tarred nudes and painted mules parading into a big top of smoking mirrors.

At the start of this thing, only three and half short months ago, Barack Obama looked like something we have never seen and would never see again, something almost weirdly pristine. After three months under constant campaigning, truckloads of cash spent, and Clinton Machine muckraking, he is sounding and looking like he might be just another tired Democratic leftist quack with not a chance in the world to cut into America’s very real Puritan/Racial/Cultural/Generational divide.

Perhaps he carries down with him the hope and prospects of an anti-cynical stance for a new generation of voter, who is fast learning what we all learn eventually: This is not a game for high-minded idealism, but a cushy seat in the black hole.